Castle Shade

by Laurie R. King

  Why?

  He betrayed no signs of a terminal illness, that might be driving him to give away his possessions. He could be aiming to out-do Mr Florescu as a sponsor of village youth, except that schools could be built and scholarships established as easily from rental income and stock returns as money in a bank.

  Was I in fact following a wrong scent? Andrei had seen the doctor’s motor in an unusual place and at the key time, but what did that mean? The doctor was in Bran at all hours. He could have been taking a walk in the woods, and parked behind the old barn to discourage thieves—or even to avoid conversation with local busybodies. When it came to proof of wrongdoing, did we have a single blessed thing? Even if he had abducted Gabi and taken her away inside the bench of his motorcar, my subsequent occupation had now overwritten much of the evidence.

  I looked across the dark room at the man’s desk. If I removed that entire folder of communications with his solicitor, how long would it be before he noticed?

  And more important: what on earth was delaying Holmes?

  Chapter Forty-four

  It was nine-thirty. I had been in the house more than two hours, and was no closer to finding Gabriela than I had been when the sun came up. The odds of the doctor returning increased with every tick of the big clock in the hallway. However, there was little point in leaving the house until either he or Holmes showed up. And there were certainly plenty of rooms to hide in.

  I debated taking a few folders away to some upstairs room, but if he noticed them missing, it would be over. And I could look at them here, but it was too dangerous to show light, and drawing the curtains risked his noticing when the head-lamps went across the house.

  Instead, I slid open the library window a couple of inches, to give me warning of an approaching motor, and draped the travelling rug over a small table to hide my light. I considered taking one of the candles, but between the heat, the inevitable drips, and the chance of a betraying smell, it was better to wear down my batteries. I withdrew under the blanket with the solicitor’s file, and settled in to read.

  This time, I began at the back of the file-folder, although I found the sequence of letters more thematic than chronological.

  The earliest correspondence was from January, 1923, when a German solicitor wrote to inform Dr Mikó that a distant uncle had died and left him his entire estate. Most of it was tied up in stocks and properties, but to judge by the doctor’s grateful letters, the cash alone made for a huge windfall. The surprise, the questions, the letters that followed brought a sense of wonder. Mikó travelled to Hamburg twice, to see the solicitor, or possibly three times—some of the correspondence seemed to be missing.

  The first trip was four months after the initial news reached him. A letter in June, written upon his return to Brașov, was filled with simple pleasure, his thanks, and a mention that the inheritance would make a considerable difference to “my people here.”

  Shortly after that, the doctor placed an order for the English shooting-brake. That was also around the same time that Father Constantin said he had expanded the days of his surgery in Bran.

  For the next year, the letters concerned the transfer of ownership and details of the properties involved. Then came a letter dated June 1924. After some detailed instructions on a problematic contract in Dusseldorf, Mikó wrote:

  In recent months, I have been considering this substantial change in my life, and I would like to come and speak with you in person about the possibilities it has opened. I also need you to find for me an expert in Roumanian and international property law, who can—

  The remainder of the letter was missing.

  Then in November, just under two years after the uncle had died, the doctor made another trip to Hamburg, although it was only referred to obliquely—“As per our conversation last month,” said the carbon letters in German. During that conversation, he had apparently instructed his solicitor to sell as many of the properties as possible. One letter made passing reference to his Roumanian solicitor, so I made note of the name, but there was no hint as to what he was doing other than “going forward.”

  The entire folder, I thought, felt maddeningly incomplete. Almost as if the man had gone through and deliberately removed key documents.

  “Doctor, what are you hiding?” I murmured aloud—and with that, two things happened. First, my eye caught on a phrase halfway down a page, and second, the creak of a floorboard had me fighting out from under the rug to confront my attacker.

  “Holmes! Damn it, man, couldn’t you have cleared your throat or something? How did you get here? I didn’t hear a motor.”

  “I had the Queen’s driver drop me at the end of the drive, since I did not think coming all the way to the house would be the best idea. He seemed to think that the doctor had a telephone installed here, and gave me the number of a taxi service in Brașov, in case I got stuck.”

  “We may need to ring them if the doctor doesn’t reappear. But I’m glad to see you.”

  The papers were spread across half the floor, the table now lay on its side, the travelling rug thrown off—it was a good thing I’d decided against the candle, or we’d be stamping out flames. I started gathering up pages and returning them to some kind of order. It took me a minute to find the one I’d been reading.

  “Sorry?” I asked, realising he’d said something.

  “Where is the doctor? His motor is not in the stables.”

  “He was only here for a few minutes and then he drove off again, about two hours ago. I expect he’s dining out, since he didn’t have anything before he left. Did Andrei tell you where I’d gone? Oh,” I said, remembering the last thing he’d said to me before we parted ways. “You said you’d realised that Florescu was hiding something from us. Could it have been Andrei?”

  “To be honest, I suspected it had to do with the doctor. There is a great deal of history between them that Mr Florescu did not bother to tell us about. However, more immediately, yes: Andrei told me you’d been interested in how he’d seen the doctor’s motor, so I knew you were going after him. However, it did take some time to discover the exact location of the Mikó house.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “No? How did you get here?”

  “He brought me. Not that he knew it. I was under that seat he has in his motor, for transporting patients. Turns out it’s a kind of box. There’s a lock on the outside.”

  I could see the many questions running across his face, but since any of them would have come out as accusations, he hesitated—just long enough for me to wave the page under his nose.

  “I’ve found something, but we probably should move to a room that doesn’t overlook the drive quite so openly. Oh—wait. Does this look familiar?”

  I had dug out the single sheet of card-stock from the desk. He took it, felt it, tested its bend, even held it under his nose. “It is very similar, but I should have to have both in a laboratory to see if it is in all ways the same as the other.”

  “Do you want to hang on to it?”

  He thought for a moment, then handed it back to me. “For the time, let us leave it here.”

  I put it back in the drawer. “There’s no one in the house, his servants appear to have been gone for a couple of weeks. We should hear when he returns, but it’s probably best not to be right here. Bring that folder,” I said, and restored the table, woollen throw, and window to their original positions.

  The billiards room had no windows and plenty of dust. I flipped on a lamp and took the folder from Holmes, spreading out pages across the baize surface. “The Mikós have been prominent in the Brașov area for centuries. There’s a family tree in the library that links the doctor’s ancestors to the area’s thirteenth-century Saxon rulers. This was their country house—they had another in Brașov itself, but the doctor’s father sold it about fifty years ago.
That seems to have marked the beginning of a down-turn in the family fortunes. By the time the War began, the Mikó estate was in trouble, and when Transylvania went to Roumania in 1920, things became very tight indeed. The doctor appears to be the last survivor of the family, and inherited the estate when his father died in 1910. Between 1919 and 1923, he had to sell off several remaining farms from around the estate. Then two and a half years ago, he inherited a fortune from an uncle he’d scarcely known.

  “And yet, he did not spend it on this house. He hired back a couple of the servants, bought that car and had it adapted as an ambulance, and had some very nice suits made—but he spent almost nothing on the family house. Oh, except a new hot-water geyser in his bath-room.”

  “Yet he continued living here,” Holmes noted, taking the page I handed him. This showed the current boundaries of the estate—considerably reduced from those on the grand, faded map in the estate offices.

  “Last November, he went to Hamburg to see the solicitor he’d inherited along with his uncle’s estate. Since then, the main focus of their communications has been the process of converting real estate and stock portfolios into cash.”

  “Any indication what he plans to do with it?”

  “That’s what I was searching for. But while I looked, I kept noticing that there were pages missing and references made to letters that weren’t here. And yes, it could be poor record-keeping, but it could also be—”

  “A deliberate attempt to expunge the record of some systematic crime or wrongdoing.”

  “Exactly.” Holmes was bent over the fanned-out pages on the table, picking up one here, setting one atop another there. I let him be, since confirming the faint patterns I thought I had seen was even more important than hurry. Ten minutes later, he straightened, his grey eyes continuing to travel over the pages.

  “Do you see it, too?” I asked.

  “I see an outline.”

  I held out the page in my hand. “Because his filing system is somewhat slap-dash, he left a couple of things that he might not have intended. One of them was an order from Fortnum & Mason—I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But I think he also overlooked this letter in the culling process. That phrase, with the word Familienschloss?” I tapped the German lettering. “It’s to his solicitor in Hamburg. And my German’s a little rusty, but it seems to me he’s saying that his Roumanian property lawyer is looking for a way that he can take back the family castle.

  “Holmes, I think he’s talking about Bran.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  Holmes propped one hip onto the billiards table, head bowed over the carbon-copy, thinking so hard I could hear the whir. I gathered the papers in something close to the order I’d found them in. Holmes finished, and set the key page on the top.

  “The doctor should have returned by now,” Holmes said, without moving.

  “He could be with friends.”

  “Did he dress?”

  “He changed his shirt, but his evening suit is upstairs. And Holmes? He has a gun. Something that takes 9mm bullets. There was a half-empty box in his desk drawer.”

  “Probably a Steyer automatic,” he muttered. Then, in a typically abrupt change of subject, asked, “Was that letter the only mention of a castle?”

  “The only one I saw, although I haven’t read everything thoroughly. But, the Roumanian solicitor his German lawyer found for him is an expert in international property law.”

  “Couldn’t it be another castle? This country seems to have more of them than Scotland.”

  “True. On the other hand, the doctor has a large and dramatic painting of Castle Bran on his bedroom wall, where he would see it last thing at night and first thing in the morning. There are also half a dozen places around the house where paintings hung until recently. At first, I thought the gaps were where he’d been forced to sell off his valuables along with some of the estate farms, in the years after the War.”

  “But you feel he took them down to conceal his monomania.”

  “If he was planning something that would return Castle Bran to his possession, he might not want people to see how deeply interested, even fixated, he was on the place. That would also be a reason for removing the potentially incriminating correspondence from his records.”

  “Because he intends to do something criminal.”

  “If it’s not criminal, why try to hide his tracks? He anticipates the attention of outsiders—the police. One painting of a castle on the wall is an innocent decoration. A dozen views of the same castle would create suspicion.”

  “The servants would know, if he’d taken paintings down.”

  “But would anyone think to ask them? Just like no one would think to ask…” My voice trailed away as a thought struck me. A small thing, seen out of the corner of my eye, but persistently irritating.

  Holmes didn’t notice my preoccupation. “We need to speak with this Roumanian legal gentleman, although he may not wish to tell us anything. The doctor is a respected person in Brașov, and openly revered in Bran: no one would believe he would attack a woman and abduct a girl.”

  “Even I find it hard to credit. He does seem honestly to care for the people. You and I have both met men who kill for pleasure, Holmes. Would you have thought Dr Mikó capable of it?”

  “A doctor, a soldier, he has seen many things, and no doubt done his share of hard tasks. I will admit, I did not see corruption hiding in the man’s soul. It requires very cold blood indeed to abduct a simple, hard-working village girl from her way home—a girl he has known all her life—and deliberately murder her.”

  The word startled me out of the thought I was trying to hunt down. “Murder! Holmes, do you think she’s dead?”

  “The longer he keeps her, the less choice he may have in the matter. Even assuming he performed the abduction itself in the same way he took you, and that she did not see him or his distinctive motorcar, once she is awake, she becomes a danger. She can be heard. She could see him, if he brings her food.”

  “You’re right. Although, once he had her imprisoned, he could just wear a mask, or slip her food under—wait.”

  Something I had seen…

  More bits of the puzzle were clicking into place. Gabi’s physical resemblance to Ileana. Taking her at night. The lack of a latch on my own prison. My fingers went to the high neck of my blouse, as I thought about this man who did not strike either of us as a killer. A man with a hamper of English goods.

  “What if this is all one act?” I said.

  “In what way?”

  “Kidnap, threat, rumours…Holmes, you often note that the little things can be the most important.”

  If he was surprised at the side-track, he did not show it. “Certainly when it comes to an investigation.”

  “Let me show you something.”

  I led him through the dark hallways to the kitchen and the pantry beyond. I shut the door and turned on the electrical light, then flipped back the top of the Fortnum & Mason hamper.

  “When the doctor left tonight, he took with him a packet of water biscuits, a piece of cheese, and a Malvern Water.”

  I watched him pick up the packet of Earl Grey tea, check its contents, and decide—as I had—that all one could say was that the smell and general appearance were what we had found in the hex bundle. He returned it to the hamper, surveyed the remaining contents, then sat back on his heels to look at the shelves around us, with their basic staples and tins, packets from Italy and Germany, mineral water from France—and nothing from England other than what had been sent him in July.

  “One other thing,” I said, when he had finished.

  Back in the doctor’s library, on the wall directly in front of the man’s favourite chair, hung his family tree. I tugged the room’s curtains shut again, that we might use our torches to examine it, and checked that my memory had been
correct. Yes, it told a story within a story.

  The tree itself was nearly four feet on a side and lavishly illustrated with gilt-edged coats-of-arms and portraits of the eminent. Two generations out of date now, the roots of the genealogical tree were in a fifteenth-century Voivode, or warrior-king, and included various princes of Transylvania. All the men were fierce of beard and intelligent of eye—and I noticed the name Báthory more than once. What had caught at the edge of my mind was a slight, nearly invisible break in the line between one of the last princes and the last shown Mikó, our doctor’s grandfather.

  If I remembered my European history correctly, around 1700 this part of the world had shifted from the Ottomans to the Hapsburgs, taking its title of Prince of Transylvania with it. The tree did include the Austrian emperors as far as Franz Joseph. They were, however, over at the very edge, so as to leave plenty of room for the full details of the Mikó family line.

  Had it not been for that missing fraction of the trunk—the only gap in the entire meticulously detailed tree—the line of succession between Voivode, Prince, and doctor would be a direct one. Instead, a fact the artist had worked hard to obscure under decorative swirls and handsome portraits, the trunk was broken, to indicate the sad truth of an illegitimate son.

  That small gap meant that, as the decades went by, the doctor’s family became increasingly distant cousins to the hereditary rulers of Transylvania.

  I laid my finger on the small section of missing trunk.

  “You know, I think the doctor may be creating a story,” I told Holmes. “One in which he is the hero.”

  Chapter Forty-six

  Once upon a time there was a young man from the town of Brașov.

  He came from a family of high-ranking boyars, Saxons who had arrived in the thirteenth century and built themselves into the highest levels in the principality of Transylvania. Unlike many of their class, the boy’s family remained in their homeland, managing their own estate rather than leasing out the land and moving to a more fashionable home in France or Italy. The boy’s father was a proud man and a patriot, adamant on responsibility and service—even as the changing world, a series of bad years, and his own disastrous habits of making poor decisions and placing trust in the untrustworthy whittled away the land that gave them status.